The framework agreement reached last week between the UN “5 plus 1” group and Iran has won general approval internationally, except in Israel and among Benjamin Netanyahu’s Republican Party claque in Washington, where such was never expected.

The first foreign policy speech given by a major Republican presidential prospect, Jeb Bush, in mid-February, was notable for its display of ignorance about the world and its menaces. Unfortunately, such ignorance is common among Republicans.

The most devastating criticism that historians are likely to have of Barack Obama’s record in the White House is his devastating failure in foreign policy—a failure that stems from his willingness to leave the warrior ideologues of the State and Defense departments in place after becoming president.

A fundamental theme of Israeli propaganda—and virtually its sole theme under the governments of Benjamin Netanyahu—has been that anti-Semitism is responsible for the growing criticism of or hostility toward Israel and its policies.

Nothing Washington or NATO can do for Ukraine will give it anything approaching an independent ability to expel Russian-reinforced Ukrainian separatists and expel the Russian invaders who support them.

The recent excitement in Paris produced an occasion of great surprise to an American observer, certainly to one who witnessed the transformational fear exacted from America’s governing elite by the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

The folk-wisdom incorporated into the story of the Tar Baby and Br’er Rabbit applies to the Middle Eastern wars from which the United States and the West want to retreat, but again and again find themselves caught deep in the tar.

Chuck Hagel’s departure from his post as defense secretary has been attributed to his failure to fit in with the Obama cabinet’s crowd. Among his other reported deficiencies was that he was only a sergeant in Vietnam, twice wounded.

Given the current dismal state of the European Union economy, which is now firmly under German control, one must ask why Angela Merkel and her government continue to champion austerity, seemingly against all reason.

President Barack Obama, in the interview given last weekend to The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, provided illumination on his foreign policy thinking, at this moment of fraught drama in both Iraq and Ukraine, but the counsels concerning the two didn’t match.

Barring the increasingly influential isolationist/tea party wing of the American electorate, opinion is and always has been that the United States is the messenger of democracy to a world that usually hasn’t earned it and probably doesn’t deserve it.

The Marines—250 of them, together with carrier air support and Marine Corps Osprey support craft—have been dispatched to save the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the “biggest in the world,” “the size of the Vatican City,” with its swimming pools and skating rinks, from the menace of the offensive directed at Baghdad by the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Neoconservative commentator Robert Kagan, co-founder in 1997 of the Project for a New American Century, and after that institution crashed amid the ruins of Iraq, founder of its 2009 successor, the Foreign Policy Initiative, is continuing his crusade for a new Reaganism—which he construes as American world domination.

Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and threat to Ukraine are causing damage he perhaps did not anticipate: disorientation of the United States and profound division in Europe, especially in Germany, and in NATO. A real risk of war.

A correspondent of the conservative Le Figaro, Adrien Jaulmes in Donetsk, reports Tuesday that what is taking place in the contested Russia-speaking areas resembles a “Potemkin” war, waged in the press and social media and on wall posters, but that has yet to produce any discernible popular movement.

The American people don’t want to fight the Russians, and the Russians would be mad to attack NATO forces or the Baltic States. But I am sure there are people in Moscow just like the people in Washington who say “if we don’t follow through—if we don’t ‘stand our ground’—we’ll lose our credibility.”

An international disorder unmatched since the interwar 1930s has been created by the drama of Ukraine and the Russians, combined with the inherent self-destructive forces of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the developing civil war over theological as well as political issues inside the Islamic states, and the serious risk of collapse in the European Union.

The issue of rightist nationalism as a threat to the European Union and the peace of the new Europe has preoccupied Europeans since 1945, when the predecessors of the EU—the West European Union and then the Coal and Steel Community—were created to assure that Nazism or some totalitarian counterpart would not again rise in Europe.